Mohan Jyoti Dutta

• PhD (Mass Communication), University of Minnesota
• Chair at Massey University

This essay outlines the organizing work of the Center for Culture- Centred Approach to Research and Evaluation (CARE) in mobilizing for social justice. Conceptualizing health in relationship to justice, the academic-activist-community partnerships built by CARE explore the organizing processes through which communities at the margins own voice infr...

This paper reports the findings from two randomized controlled experiments and a field study, evaluating the effectiveness of a culture-centered campaign co-designed with foreign domestic workers in Singapore on the public knowledge of, attitude toward, and support for policy protections for their rights. The process of co-creating voice infrastruc...

The urgency and complexity of contemporary social justice issues facing the world today mean that activists, scholars, and storytellers need a readily available compendium of cutting-edge scholarship on media and social justice. This handbook represents the collective wisdom of more than 40 leading voices across positionalities and perspectives, ge...

In this issue, we outline the central tenets of the culture-centered approach to health communication. What does the culture-centered approach address when suggesting the co-creation of voice infrastructures? What is the theory’s methodological emphasis for mobilizing and transforming structures that shape health inequalities for communities at the...

The organizational communication discipline has been criticized for not centering the voices of ethnic minority communities. This can be witnessed in the prevention of violence, where migrant communities are more vulnerable to the effects of violence but are underserved by Western models of violence prevention. Grounded in the culture-centered appr...

In this essay, we will outline the role of community-grounded public pedagogy in transforming the unequal structures that shape health disparities. Critiquing the hegemonic approaches to teaching health disparities in the curriculum, we put forth the argument that the work of addressing health disparities calls for a pedagogy of health communicatio...

Being persecuted and expelled from Myanmar, Rohingya refugees are now distributed throughout the world. The Southeast Asian nation of Malaysia has been a preferred destination for Rohingyas fleeing Myanmar’s state-sponsored genocide and more recently in a bid to change their fates from the refugee camps in Bangladesh. Refugees are one of the most v...

The flows of COVID-19 across global terrains work unequally, impacting disproportionately the margins of global spaces. Refugees constitute the “margins of the margins” of globalization, constituted in spaces without access to rights and pathways of citizenship, and living through the effects of violence targeted at them.

The accelerated and extreme neoliberal reforms across the globe have catalyzed the disenfranchisement of low-wage migrant workers (Dutta, 2020a, 2020b, 2020c; 2021a, 2021b; Kaur-Gill et al., 2021).

The COVID-19 pandemic foregrounds the unequal trajectories of infectious diseases globally, coupled with the highly unequal effects of pandemic responses adopted locally, regionally, and nationally (Bojorquez et al., 2021; Elers et al., 2021; Habersaat et al., 2020; Rydland et al., 2022). The patterns of distribution of the burdens of the pandemic...

In this chapter, we explore listening for erasures as a method in the culture-centered approach (CCA), particularly working through the ways in which listening inverts the communicative constructions of hegemonic health and communication. Through an analysis guided by the question, “Who is not present in the dominant discursive space?” we explore t...

Underpinned by the notion that communication equality is crucial in developing communication infrastructures for health and well-being, this study explores experiences of COVID-19 information retrieving in a low-income suburban area in Aotearoa from a culture-centered lens. Drawing from in-depth interviews with ethnic minority residents, we reveal...

In Teaching Communication Across Disciplines for Professional Development, Civic Engagement, and Beyond, contributors discuss topics inherent in merging communication across disciplines, including challenges and opportunities, teaching and research, communication and student identity, future directions, and the transformative possibilities of teach...

In this essay, I interrogate the whiteness of the disciplinary claims of the emergent area of rhetoric of health and medicine (RHM). Critically examining the practices of erasure written into the disciplinary claims of RHM, I attend to the strategies of establishing white hegemony paradoxically positioned as a response to the whiteness of health co...

A culture‐centered approach is employed to emphasize the importance of Indigenous peoples' and local community voice infrastructures at the “margins of the margins,” in order to foreground local strategies and solutions to health and livelihood as a result of environmental degradation and dispossession. These changes largely stem from the anthropog...

Transnational domestic work occurs in migration regimes that create hyper-precarious conditions for migrant workers performing care work. These hyper-precarious conditions produce intersecting marginalizing conditions that amplify inequalities and limit the mobility of migrant domestic workers, despite their movement from home to host country. The...

COVID-19 has exacerbated existing health inequalities globally. Guided by the culture-centered approach, this study examined perspectives and experiences of healthcare during two lockdowns in four marginalized contexts in Aotearoa New Zealand. The participants’ narratives depicted dissatisfaction with the new modes of healthcare delivery, reporting...

Currently, little is known about the experiences of gig workers in Aotearoa New Zealand, including the nature and quality of their day-to-day work, or how they have negotiated the disruption and risk brought to bear by the COVID-19 pandemic. Largely erased from the conceptual frameworks examining gig work are the voices of workers. This white paper...

The Christchurch terrorist attack urgently necessitates the development of strategies for addressing racism and hate. The challenge of social cohesion in Aotearoa New Zealand is one of addressing the networks of disinformation that propel hate, specifically addressing the growth in anti-Māori propaganda, anti-migrant attitudes, and Islamophobia. In...

The dominant approach to digital inclusion positions technology as a ‘fix’ to the challenges experienced by marginalized communities. Largely erased are the broader structures of marginalization, the role of technology in relationship to structures and the cultural contexts within which technologies are negotiated. In this essay, we culturally cent...

‘Community-led culture-centered prevention of family violence and sexual violence’ is a report submitted to the New Zealand Government on the prevention process of family violence and sexual violence (FVSV). CARE (Center for Culture Centered Approach to research and Evaluation) of Massey University has been funded by New Zealand Govt. to prepare th...

Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access...

Laws against incitement of hate speech are very much necessary in extreme situations. However, a culture-centered analysis suggests that laws against incitement are not effective in transforming cultures of intolerance and hate that are held up by political and economic interests. Those in places of power deploy hate to serve their political and ec...

The consistent association between regular physical exercise and positive health outcomes presents a compelling case for investigating the differences between individuals who exercise regularly and those who do not. Based on a randomized cross-sectional survey of 1,201 households, this study adopts a psychographic framework to investigate the role...

An extended Abstract titled 'Negotiations of Health Among Rohingya Refugees in Cox’s Bazar, Bangladesh: A Culture-Centered Approach to Health and Care' has been presented at Interactive Poster Session of ICA (International Communication Association) Conference 2021. The presentation has been displayed at ICA Hub organized by CARE (Center for Cultur...

What does community engaged scholarship look like amidst the pandemic? In this performative essay, we draw upon our negotiations of our academic place within the university while crafting solidarities in working alongside communities at the “margins of the margins” (Dutta, 2014) under the umbrella of the culture-centered approach (CCA), a meta-theo...

Little academic attention has been focused on the experiences of communities situated at the margins in receiving nonprofit services. In this essay, we draw on the culture-centered approach to critically interrogate the concept of engagement among a range of nonprofit organizations. We analyze ethnographic fieldwork conducted in a low income suburb...

Aotearoa New Zealand’s public health crisis communication approach amidst the COVID-19 pandemic effectively mobilized the nation into swift lockdown, significantly reducing community transmission. This communication approach has been applauded around the world. How did communities situated amongst the “margins of the margins” in Aotearoa New Zealan...

Visual and digital storytelling methods can reposition research participants as coproducers of knowledge, foster engagement and collaboration with marginalized peoples, and offer greater depth of self-expression. However, these methods are constituted in complex terrains of power. Without continual attenuation to power imbalances, the methods will...

Aotearoa New Zealand’s pandemic communication approach amidst the COVID-19 (C19) has been applauded around the world. The New Zealand government’s border controls and other measures in response to C19 impacted refugees at the margins and prevented people from accessing support services and healthcare. The sanctioned power to ‘care’ thus became a pe...

The body performs health in complex and contested ways, shaped by cultural dynamics, understandings, and interpretations (Airhihenbuwa, 1995). Typically read through the dominant ideologies of health, the constitution of the healthful body is often biomedically driven, and situated within the materiality of structures (Dutta, 2008). The dominant sy...

Since the coronavirus outbreak, various media outlets across the globe have disseminated and promoted stories of kindness as registers for COVID-19 response. These narratives of kindness appeal to the human capacity to do good, inviting the public to ‘make a difference’ by performing altruistic acts of helping those who are less fortunate or in a t...

Drawing upon an ongoing ethnography with low-wage migrant workers in Singapore, this article builds on the theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to explore the experiences of the workers amid COVID-19 outbreaks in dormitories housing them. The CCA foregrounds the interplays of communicative and material inequalities, suggesti...

This special issue explores what theory looks like from the Global South. Whether it is in the work of the women farmers organized into Sanghams under the umbrella of the Deccan Development Society (DDS) or in the organizing of farmers under the collective formations of La Via Campesina, the emergent work of theory is intrinsically tied to plural p...

In this review essay, we examine the various threads, debates, and dialogues around validity in interpretive methods. We address the ways in which the question of validity has emerged in the different areas of interpretive social sciences. We then delve into future directions for conversations on validity in the interpretive social sciences. The es...

The culture-centered approach (CCA) foregrounds the organizing role of communities at the “margins of the margins” of the globe as the spaces for identifying the structural challenges to health and well-being and for co-creating community-anchored solutions to these challenges. Pandemics such as COVID-19 render visible the deep-rooted inequalities...

Chapter 2 explores the thread of communication for social change in the dominant tradition. It explores the interplays of power in the theorization and practices of communication for social change, attending to the meanings that are foregrounded in the reproduction of colonial and capitalist interests. The intertwined relationship between developme...

The neoliberal transformation of social change communication is intricately tied to the foregrounding of communication technologies as the basis of change. Through various communicative inversions, technologies are projected as emancipatory tools of transformation, while simultaneously building new markets for transnational capital. This chapter wo...

This chapter outlines the relationship between culture and social change communication. After attending to the historical context within which culture emerged into social change communication, attention is paid to the reworking of culture into the development, implementation and evaluation of development communication interventions. The chapter exa...

This chapter sets up an overview of communication for social change, drawing from the histories, trajectories, and various strands of theorizing, empirical scholarship, and applications of social change communication. Revisiting a framework for classifying communication for social change I had developed in 2008, the chapter will explore the contemp...

This chapter offers an important corrective to the dominant social change communication literature, closely examining the nature of social change articulated in Marxist frameworks. The role of communication in revolutions is explored, attending to the communicative processes that underlie the organizing of workers and peasants against capital. The...

Communicative inequalities are deeply embedded in the terrains of power that constitute the politics of knowledge production. The marking of the subaltern body as incapable of producing knowledge forms the basis of colonial-capitalist extraction, co-opting the expert into transnational capital to legitimize capitalist consolidation as development....

The key tenets of the culture-centered approach (CCA) are reviewed in this chapter. Attention is paid to the theorization of culture in the CCA, situated in ongoing and dynamic interactions with structure. What are the transformative possibilities that are opened up through the anchoring of social change processes in culture? The theorization of cu...

Drawing upon the concept of agency that forms the basis for developing culture-centered interventions, this chapter explores the communicative context of agency. Noting that the erasure of the subaltern margins forms the basis of ongoing forms of colonial extraction scripted in capitalist logics, processes for building communicative equality of exp...

Governments around the world have implemented measures to manage the transmission of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19). While the majority of these measures are proving effective, they have a high social and economic cost, and response strategies are being adjusted. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends that communities should have a voi...

In this Chapter, we explore the intertwined relationship between listening and interpretive methods. After depicting the ways in which interpretive accounts offer rich, theoretically nuanced insights into listening, we explore the lessons learned from listening in interpretive methods. Working across various contexts of interpretive methods, we exp...

This article deploys the culture-centered approach to foreground the everyday constructions of farmer-suicides amid the agrarian epidemic among the farmer-widows to attend to the everyday structures that constitute the meanings of the suicides. The depictions of the patriarchal structures of decision-making in agriculture are intertwined with the b...

The essay explores the mobility of Whiteness in networks of Communication Studies that posture themselves as speaking from the Global South. Depoliticized languages of de-westernizing, internationalizing, and decolonizing are often articulated by elites in North-South networks pushing neoliberal governmentality, erasing claims to radical equality t...

Underpinned by the notion that community voices should be central to the development of localized communication infrastructures for health and well-being, this study applied Dutta’s culture-centered approach to examine the meanings of health and the navigation of being healthy among 118 people residing in low-income suburban areas in Aotearoa New Z...

Articulating that domestic workers in Singapore are marked by their subalternity, erased from the hegemonic discursive spaces in spite of their visibility as objects in the neoliberal economy, this manuscript draws on the culture-centered approach to conceptualize listening as a structurally transformative anchor to theorizing mental health. The na...

This forum brings together food, (in)security, and communication. The authors participating in this forum center communication as both process and tool for understanding, mitigating, and making meaning of food (in)security. The nine authors together discuss the role of communication in food (in)security, the central challenges for scholars and prac...

This paper reports the formative research findings of a culture-centered heart health intervention with Malay community members belonging to low-income households. The community-based culture-centered intervention entailed working in the grassroots with community stakeholders to tailor a heart health campaign with and for low-income Malay Singapore...

Multiple communicative erasures are embedded in the labor practices of migrant domestic work. The parallel experiences of South Asian workers laboring in Noida (India) and Singapore as experiences of (im)mobilities and expulsions are discussed amid the construction and importation of the “The Singapore Model” across Asian cities. We specifically he...

The neoliberal/neocolonial transformation of agriculture in the global South is achieved through the hegemony of expert-led interventions of privatization that erase the knowledge of agricultural practices held by subaltern communities. Neocolonial development interventions serve the privatizing logics of agro-capital through the circulation of log...

Drawing on the culture-centered approach (CCA), this book re-imagines culture as a site for resisting the neocolonial framework of neoliberal governmentality. Culture emerged in the 20th Century as a conceptual tool for resisting the hegemony of West-centric interventions in development, disrupting the assumptions that form the basis of development...

The Marxist roots of critical methodology envision method as anchor to an emancipatory politics that seeks structural transformation. Drawing on our negotiations of carrying out culture-centered health communication projects amidst neoliberal authoritarianism, we explore the nature of academic-activist-community collaborations in envisioning democr...

I am sitting here at what is a 2-day workshop on the ‘Asian turn’ in the Enchanted City. ¹ The conversations, one after another, turn to Asia, the Asia that is the source of revival. The celebratory rhetoric of the workshop makes visible the carnivalesque spirit around the ‘return’ of Asia. Here, to turn is to ‘re-turn’. What imaginaries of Asia ar...

Hegemons arise by smashing and terrorizing human diversity. They do so structurally, institutionally, and discursively—that is, through logics, rationales, and schemes. In this special issue, we grapple with the racism problem that pervades communication studies. In fact, the discipline has long had a racism problem, silenced by overarching structu...

This affective/sensorial performance, woven through with interlocking poetic and narrative expressions, voices the visceral wounds of racism that form the infrastructures of communication studies. It grapples with the merit games that make up White hegemony, seeking to render visible the mediocrity and intellectual emptiness of these games. Aesthet...

The ubiquity of the Internet in all domains of human communication merits a renewed focus on the channel complementarity and displacement hypotheses, not least because social media enables the sharing of information beyond information-seeking. The present study draws on a cross-sectional survey, conducted during the 2014 national election in India....

This article centers the voices of the widows of farmers from Yavatmal, Maharashtra, who give meaning to the patriarchal structures that unfold amid neoliberal agriculture in India. The theoretical framework of the culture-centered approach presented in the article works in solidarity with transnational feminist scholarship to interrupt the dominan...

Foreign domestic workers from industrializing economies migrate to Singapore to feed its labor market, meeting the growing need for performing feminized labor. Although foreign domestic workers have been an integral part of Singaporean households since the 1970s, the presence of foreign domestic workers in contemporary public discourse remains ecli...

Cultural communication has been put forth in the context of globalization and the emergence of Indigenous movements as a framework for dialogue to be carried out by organizations (Love & Tilley, 2014). Concepts of Māori communication for instance have been foregrounded in the public relations literature to anchor strategies of effective engagement...

This article examines the discursive constructions of income inequality in neo-liberal Singapore. While the city-state is touted as a model for smart governance captured in the ‘Singapore model’, the accounts of everyday lived experiences in Singapore depict the unsustainability of the model as a template of development, anchored in the deep inequa...

Health education research emphasizes the importance of cultural understanding and fit to achieve meaningful psycho-social research outcomes, community responsiveness and external validity to enhance health equity. However, many interventions address cultural fit through cultural competence and sensitivity approaches that are often superficial. The...

Bauls, the rural minstrels who sing songs of transformation, are a socio-economically and politico-religiously marginalized cultural population from rural Bengal (both from eastern and north-eastern, India and from Bangladesh). They identify themselves outside of any organized religion or established caste system in India, and therefore are constit...

Community-based participatory research (CBPR) has captured public health attention and support because it is positioned as an approach that involves researchers and communities as equitable partners in addressing health disparities. However, it is unknown the extent to which CBPR creates a participatory space in the scientific discourse to signal “...

In the ever-changing information environment of the early twenty-first century, citizens and journalists alike are eagerly adapting to new technologies, and India is no different. The country’s communication revolution in the post-liberalization era has led to one of the largest media markets in the world. Further, changes in Media ownership and th...

This study draws on a culturally centered collaboration with a community of dalit women farmers in South India who were organized in a cooperative in their collective resistance against the corporatization of agriculture. Situated in the backdrop of the epidemic of farmer suicides in the region, this manuscript examines how those at the margins of...

Global communication can be difficult in the best of circumstances. The contributors in this book take seriously the premise that one can examine communication within specific global settings and scenes with the goal of ensuring that the meanings made among those within specific communities is more clearly understood. This includes recognizing that...

This chapter provides an overview of the culture-centered approach (CCA) to social change communication, outlining the methods of the approach. It provides a framework of the key theoretical concepts of the CCA, connecting these concepts with the method of social change communication. The methods adopted within the CCA are constituted within the ov...

This introductory chapter sets the key concepts to be covered in the book, offering a map for theorizing the role of communication and the relationship between communication and social change. It lays out a framework to be explored throughout the book, setting up the key concepts and the ways in which these concepts are weaved into the methods and...

In China, use of benzene in common raw materials like paints, thinners, solvents, and glue in factories has been linked to diseases like leukaemia, leukopenia (reduced white blood cell count), severe anaemia, and asthma in exposed workers. Apart from straining the public healthcare system, benzene exposure causes untold suffering to victims and the...

This essay discusses the role of voice in witnessing pain amid state-military sponsored genocide situated within the overarching framework of Cold War authoritarian capitalism, offering a culture-centered framework for memorializing the torture carried out by dominant socio-political structures, thus resisting the narrative erasure reproduced by th...

Media plays an important role in broadcasting stigmas. Research on media and public stigma attitudes toward homosexual stigma show mixed results. Few studies, however, focus on how the stigmatized individuals and groups perceive and react to stereotyped media portrayals. This study focuses on stigma against gender and sexual minorities, targeted as...

The book covers the trajectories and trends in social change communication, engaging the key theoretical debates on communication and social change. Attending to the concepts of communication and social change that emerge from and across the global margins, the book works toward offering theoretical and methodological lessons that de-center the dom...

Although there is increasing scholarly work to explore gendered impacts of climate change adaptation policies, few studies are grounded in the lived experiences of poor women farmers. This chapter adds to scholarly research to understand local gendered impacts of climate change adaptation policies by foregrounding the voices of Dalit women farmers...

This entry emphasizes how communication has matured as a discipline, being at the forefront now of experiments aimed at the improvement of human health and well‐being. Whereas the mainstream framework of health communication pragmatically addresses health at the individual, interpersonal, small group, organizational, community, and mass media level...

Stigma and discrimination are primary drivers of health disparities among marginalized communities. Drawing on stigma management, minority stress model, and social cognitive theories, this article tests the interplay between dimensions of stigma, collective efficacy, and advocacy communication among men who have sex with men (MSM) and transgender f...

Background: There is increasing knowledge of sex-specific differences in cardiovascular disease and recognition of sex disparities in management. In our study, we investigated whether a cardiovascular programme tailored to the specific needs of women could lead to improved outcomes. Methods: We randomised 100 female patients to receive cardiolog...

This study highlights the role of local communities in creating culturally rooted health information resources based on comparative effectiveness research (CER), depicting the role of culture in creating entry points for building community-grounded communication structures for evidence-based health knowledge. We report the results from running a ye...

This article offers a conceptual overview of the key principles of the culture-centered approach (CCA) as a meta-theoretical framework for addressing health inequalities by building communicative infrastructures for listening to the voices of subaltern communities that are hitherto erased from dominant discursive spaces. Complementing a growing bod...